An Agent of Deceit

by Chris Morgan Jones

  Lock had spent the morning sending calming messages to all his contacts in the offshore world and was late. He apologized as he sat down, slightly out of breath.

  ‘That’s quite all right,’ said Friis. ‘I should think you have a lot on.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Your supporting role in The Times.’

  ‘Oh God, did you see it? Yes, I’ve had better weekends.’

  ‘Someone sent it to me. It didn’t look too bad. Everyone has lawsuits, don’t they?’

  ‘Exactly. They do. Yes, they do. Have you ordered a drink?’ Lock looked around for a waiter, his hand in the air. ‘Yes, it could have been worse. The FT had an inch on it this morning and I expect Vedomosti will wake up to it sometime this week. Look, Mikkel, I . . . well, look, I wouldn’t want you to think that this was a problem.’

  ‘Not at all, not at all,’ said Friis, looking at Lock unwaveringly. Next to Lock he looked the model of health and potential. ‘If you are forced to drop out I will just finish everything myself.’

  Friis held Lock’s eye and then laughed, and Lock laughed with him, not really knowing whether he was joking or not. A waiter arrived. Lock ordered a gin and tonic, Friis a sparkling water.

  Their conversation from that point was about restaurants. Where to find their maître d’. Whether he should be Turkish. What music to play in the bar. The problems of sourcing good aubergines in Moscow. How to manage their chef’s inability to speak much English or any Russian. And, critically, how to ensure that this would be a mistresses’ restaurant and not a wives’ restaurant. In a practical and apparently organic scheme the good restaurants in Moscow, or at least the expensive ones, were all designated as one or the other, and the average bill would vary greatly between the two. The history of Moscow nightlife was dotted with extravagantly chic restaurants that had failed because rich, middle-aged Russians didn’t splash out on their middle-aged wives. The incentive for the restaurateur to create a mistresses’ restaurant was therefore great, but neither Lock nor Friis would have any say in the classification; all they could hope to do was influence the process. ‘The thing is,’ said Lock, letting a piece of raw wagyu beef slip from his chopsticks, ‘if you make it sexy enough, people won’t want to bring their wives. It just doesn’t feel right. Well, some might, but they’re the ones who don’t have mistresses.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Friis. ‘I don’t know. I think you’re half right. I think it’s about price. Look at this: two thousand roubles for that. And that’s your starter. How much was your fish? Another two thousand? Three? No one wants to spend this on their wife. It’s simple. For this much you’re expecting to get laid. With some degree of certainty. You look at Cinquecento, that Italian place on Petrovka. It’s beautiful. It’s not even like Moscow in there. It’s like a day trip to Sardinia or something. The food is amazing. But it’s full of fifty-five-year-old Russian women in navy suits with their fat husbands. No one talks. It’s like a state archive. I bet you they don’t last another year. And why? Because they’re too cheap. You spend half what you spend here. It’s a fantastic deal, and no one wants to look cheap in front of his latest dim blonde. Or smart brunette, in your case.’ Friis smiled and forked the last of his starter into his mouth. ‘Which is why’, he concluded, pushing away his plate, his mouth full, ‘we are going to be very expensive.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Lock. ‘There are a lot of very expensive restaurants in Moscow.’

  ‘Yes, and a lot of not so expensive ones too. And the expensive ones are always full. Trust me on this. I’m the businessman. You worry about getting the permissions from City Hall. A nudge from friend Konstantin will be very useful.’

  Lock nodded and finished his drink.

  ‘What about Oksana to be front of house?’ said Friis. ‘She’d be amazing.’

  ‘Christ, really?’ Lock laughed. ‘People would come for a look, I suppose, but she doesn’t suffer fools. You’ve never seen her on form. Quite frightening. She might teach the punters some manners but they wouldn’t come back.’

  Friis laughed and wiped his mouth neatly with his napkin. ‘So how much does Tourna want?’

  Lock looked over Friis’s shoulder for the waitress.

  ‘I don’t know. We’ll find out. A little more than the others probably. That’s usually how it works.’

  ‘Is Malin worried?’

  That was good, thought Lock – Malin worried. In his experience, when things went wrong Malin could rage silently but he doubted that he ever worried.

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with him,’ he said. ‘It’s a Faringdon matter.’

  Friis smiled. Lock raised his hand to attract their waitress and as he did so one of his phones rang. The dedicated phone.

  ‘Excuse me Mikkel, I have to take this,’ he said, sliding out from his bench seat and silently asking the waitress to bring him the same again. What was Malin going to say about the article? He had to have expected one sooner or later, and this hadn’t been too bad. He walked between tables towards the door.

  ‘Konstantin, hello. How are you?’

  ‘I am fine, Richard.’

  ‘Did you see the piece?’

  ‘I am not calling about the article. I have news that I thought you should hear. Dmitry Gerstman is dead.’

  Lock didn’t react. A hundred thoughts struggled to form. He was outside now.

  ‘He died in Budapest. He fell from a roof.’ Malin said. ‘I know no more. Perhaps you could try to find out.’

  ‘When?’ said Lock, looking across the river at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, an unearthly block of white in the stark sunlight.

  ‘Yesterday. It is sad news. Please send flowers to his wife. Not from me, from you.’

  ‘I will. Of course.’

  ‘I will see you later, Richard.’

  ‘Yes, I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  Lock crossed the road, not quite heedless of the cars, and stood by the railings above the river. The wind was stronger than it had been in the morning. He had liked Gerstman; he had felt kinship with him. They had occupied the same world, and when Gerstman had left he had given hope to Lock that one day, if he could find his courage, he might do the same. It was childish, he thought, the stuff of boys’ adventure books, but he felt like a prisoner of war who learns that his fellow officer has been shot while trying to escape. And he knew, without having to learn more, that that was why Gerstman had died.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Webster was pleased to see the name of Savas Onder appear in the file; it was like finding an old friend at rather a stiff party. Onder, he hoped, might actually speak to him.

  He was beginning to feel unpopular. Since Dmitry Gerstman had shown such aversion to him in Berlin, he had been calling and visiting anyone he could find who knew Malin or Lock. He had spoken to friends in the oil industry who had known little, and to friends of Lock who had said less. In Baku he had tracked down a Scot who had set up a business with Lock in 1993; he had talked more than most Scots but told him only that Lock was no businessman: ‘there’s a man who buggers the notion that lawyers know how to make money’. He had found two people who remembered Lock from university – one, in fact, still saw him on his trips to London – but neither thought it seemly to talk and Webster couldn’t fault their loyalty. And he had called eleven directors and company agents associated with the ever more complicated corporate knot that Lock had tied; none had said anything of substance, but it would have been strange if they had. Nervous though he was of wives (former or not), he was even preparing to see Mrs Lock, who seemed to have left her husband and moved to London.

  So to see Onder’s name felt like luck. One of Webster’s better researchers had been working her way through a list of companies that had traded with Faringdon or Langland, and after some determined work had found that the mysterious-sounding Katon Services LS was a part of Onder’s oil-trading empire. Webster wasn’t surprised to see him there: it was on a Russian matter that Onder had first engaged hi
m years before and it would have been strange if he and Malin had never crossed paths.

  It was Friday, the first day that felt like autumn, and they were to meet that morning at Onder’s London office; to Webster’s regret Onder was not in Istanbul, one of the few places that he was always happy to travel to. He and Elsa had spent half of an unorthodox honeymoon there one December (the other on the coast by North Berwick, so cold that thick frost lay on the dune grass) and he hoped one day to take her there again.

  Instead of the Pera Palace Hotel, then, Webster was in his kitchen that morning doing his best to leave the house. He had woken early and cycled to the Heath for a swim in the mixed pond, where the water was turning from cool to cold. When he got back he made porridge for himself and the children, took Elsa tea, showered, shaved, and dressed in the same suit as the day before, deciding that Onder probably didn’t expect a tie, even though he might merit one. Webster’s taste was for the serious and unadorned: dark suits, single-breasted, either navy or charcoal grey, with white shirts and dark ties, never patterned. Everything was well made and well worn. Elsa told him that he looked for ever on the verge of delivering bad news, a death or a sacking, and he told her that nobody wanted their investigator to dress like a fop.

  On his walk to the Tube across a newly frosty Queen’s Park he thought about Lock. He found himself thinking about him more and more. He should be feeling uncomfortable by now. He would have seen the article – articles, as a few other papers had taken up the story. Webster was pleased with Hewson’s piece in The Times, but surprised that it hadn’t gone further; he would have expected a second article to follow swiftly on the first. He should give Gavin another call. Perhaps it didn’t matter: he had also spoken to the FT, to the Journal, to Forbes, and felt sure that there was more to come. He wanted Lock to feel that a process had started that no one could stop.

  What would have him really unsettled, though, were the calls from his friends. No one liked to learn that someone was asking questions about them. Even if you had nothing to hide it made you wonder whether in fact you did; and if, like Lock, you had made a career of hiding things it tended to make you decidedly nervous. For Webster, though, this was a strange way of operating: he spent so much of his life asking questions in the dark that to be out in the light made him feel a little uncomfortable himself.

  So Gerstman would probably have mentioned it to Lock, unless he was keen to stay out of Russia altogether, and all those offshore directors would certainly have reported to their client. Webster wondered how much of this Lock would share with Malin. From the outside there was no way of telling how close they were, and accounts differed. The Scot had described the two as ‘friendly, but not intimate’, while those who knew Russia’s oil industry simply saw Lock, as Tourna did, as a stooge.

  Webster thought about the type, these men – always men – who sold their identity to protect that of another. In every big project they appeared, the first line of defence, often shabbily prepared for battle. They were professionals, lawyers and accountants to a man, and of the second rank, their early careers suggesting that they had never been bound for the top. Some started young, others in middle age. In Webster’s world there were legions of them, of every nationality, operating out of unreal little offices in London, Dubai, Geneva, New York, setting up companies, dissolving them, tinkering endlessly with money. What did they get out if it, this unnatural, unbreakable arrangement? In Webster’s experience there were three motives, usually entwined. There was money – and easy money it was. Judging from his properties and his lifestyle, Lock must be worth ten million, perhaps twenty, and for this what did he do, really? Administer companies. There was security of income, since this was always a job for life: your client couldn’t walk away and neither could you. And there was power. Or rather, proximity to power. They had in common the mistaken belief that in serving a big man some of his stature would rub off.

  Onder’s offices were in Mayfair, in the narrow streets by Shepherd Market. Odd shops inexplicably survived there: Italian outfitters selling pale-blue shoes and mustard leather jackets, to whom Webster couldn’t imagine; tiny beauty salons offering French pedicure and electrolysis; a toy shop that stocked only toy soldiers, each one historically accurate in its uniform. Webster found Onder’s battered red door next to a florist, rang the buzzer, and was let in.

  He climbed a flight of stairs and Onder himself came to greet him on the first landing. Hammer had once said of Onder that his size, ‘in every respect’, was his best quality. He was a tall man, perhaps three inches over six feet, his chest inflated, his hand enclosing Webster’s entirely as they shook. What Hammer had meant, though, was that Onder’s actions and his character were grand: his voice was loud, his generosity instant and complete, his transgressions wholehearted. He was wearing a light grey suit that verged on the silvery and a bright pink tie. Webster was pleased to see him. In his company he remembered vividly what a rare combination Onder was: a trader, a man used to making dozens of subtle calculations every moment, who could nevertheless really think, and plan ahead, and exercise great wisdom when called upon.

  ‘Benedict!’ Onder said, with almost actorly diction, smiling broadly. ‘How nice to see you. Please, please. Come in.’ One of the stranger facts about this unusual man was that at sixteen he had moved to England with his family and had spent the last two years of school at Eton. This had given him a certain stateliness that forty years later seemed old-fashioned, even imperial.

  He ushered Webster through a faded reception area to his office at the back of the building. They saw no one else on the way. Onder’s office was large, and light enough, but drab. It had too much furniture in it: three wooden-topped desks, their varnish dry and worn; four dull grey filing cabinets; chairs everywhere, some stacked against the wall. Only the phones and the computers suggested that any time had passed since 1970. A bay window, its lower panes frosted, gave out onto a channel of grey house-backs.

  ‘I apologize for our surroundings, Benedict. Please, sit down. As you know I don’t go in for fancy offices.’

  Webster sat on one of the chairs lined up in front of Onder’s desk, the biggest of the three. ‘Istanbul is a little smarter than this.’

  ‘True. More by accident than by design.’ Onder smiled. ‘I would offer you coffee but I would have to make it myself and it would be awful. There’s never anyone else here.’

  ‘That’s fine. I’m trying to stop drinking it.’

  They sat for a moment looking at each other. Onder’s eyes were a dark, almost Prussian blue. He had a friendly but distinctly firm gaze. Webster wasn’t sure how long he should hold it – was never sure, in fact, what these little sizing-up exercises, so favoured by certain clients, really meant. He decided to start.

  ‘Thank you for seeing me at such short notice.’

  ‘Not at all, not at all. I’m always happy to help.’ Onder didn’t only trade oil: amongst other things he also traded cartridges of printer ink, and three years earlier Webster had retrieved a large consignment from a Russian distributor who had forgotten to pay. Onder had liked Ikertu ever since.

  ‘I didn’t want to talk about this on the phone, for reasons you’ll understand, I hope. It’s about Konstantin Malin.’

  Onder looked closely at him again, a slight frown in his eyes.

  ‘Malin.’ He raised his eyebrows a quarter of an inch. ‘You deal with some charming people.’

  ‘I know. He’s universally liked. I was hoping you could tell me something about him. Of course, if he’s a partner and you’d rather not we can end it here.’

  Onder continued to look at him. Then he laughed and broke the gaze.

  ‘No, Konstantin and I will not be doing business again. There is a kind of Russian who thinks it all right – no, clever – to cheat whenever there is an opportunity. Whenever they can make money. They calculate that there will be another fool along in a minute, and that the world is full of fools. One day they will find out they are wrong.’
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  ‘I hope so,’ said Webster. ‘How much does he owe you?’

  ‘Actually, he did not take money from me. He just reneged on an agreement. I have to go elsewhere for oil from Russia now. That is all. It has cost me a lot of money but I cannot say that he stole from me.’

  ‘Is there oil elsewhere?’

  ‘Yes, there is. He doesn’t control everything. Not yet.’

  ‘Did you meet him?’

  ‘Oh yes. Once or twice.’ He smiled at Webster. ‘Perhaps you should tell me why you are interested?’

  Webster told Onder the story. When he mentioned Tourna, Onder let out a snort. ‘That crook! My God, this is fighting amongst thieves. I thought you would be more choosy about your clients.’ He smiled at Webster, who smiled back and carried on. He explained what Tourna wanted, and what his own priority was now: Lock.

  ‘You want to bring down Malin? Good luck. A noble undertaking.’

  ‘I know. We don’t get many shots at nobility.’

  Onder smiled. ‘I know Richard,’ he said. ‘Quite well. I used to deal with Dmitry Gerstman but when he left I refused to have anything to do with the thug they put in his place. I didn’t trust him – one of the new breed, who look a lot like the old, old breed. It was easy to imagine him arresting people at five in the morning. So they sent Lock. I liked him. Not an oil man but useful enough. Quite a simple character. I do not think he really belonged there.’

  They talked for a while about Lock and Malin, Malin and Lock, and Webster felt that he was coming to understand them. The moment you met Malin, Onder told him, it was clear that he was ‘a creature of the Soviet’. He had been born when Stalin was in power, became an adult under Brezhnev, and worked for twenty-five years before Gorbachev departed, his job too well done, and Yeltsin finally appeared. If you were to give him the choice, he would reinstate Communist rule tomorrow, not because he despised capitalism, not because he didn’t enjoy its spoils, but because Communism had made Russia strong and, more important, feared. To sit opposite Malin and negotiate with him was to understand something about a totalitarian state: they shared the same refusal to communicate, and both equated that refusal with strength.